The Color Purple and Remains of the Day
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Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day describe very different milieus and very different kinds of characters. Letters serve as an important element in each, but they are treated differently in the style of each novel. Alice Walker's novel is structured as a series of letters through which the central character expresses her inner life, something she can never do in her day-to-day existence except by writing to another. In the Ishiguro work, the main characters are not inarticulate but reticent to allow others to see too deeply into their inner life, though one letter in which Miss Kenton may have expressed more than would be considered proper is a central concern. The film version of The Color Purple (Steven Spielberg, 1982) was commercially successful but is not that successful at capturing the essence of the novel, while the film version of The Remains of the Day (James Ivory, 1993) is more evocative of the mannered British style of the book. The book and the film of The Color Purple have very different emphases and show different attitudes on the part of their respective creators. The subject matter is essentially the same--the mistreatment of black women by their men--but the movie directed by Steven Spielberg is much more poetic in tone, so that for all its criticism of this aspect of black life, it comes off as a nostalgic film. The book has a much harder edge because it takes place in the mind of one victim of this kind of
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watching that character from a distance. Objectivity brings certain requirements for a broader truth, since there is no excusing misperceptions by the fact that these are the way this particular character sees the matter. The filmmaker risks being too one-sided when he does not expand on the material found in a novel like The Color Purple, just as he risks producing nothing but stereotypical portrayals when maintaining the simple victim-victimizer differentiation without explaining it more fully.
Walker's novel has many of the same faults, but it is also more subtle in the way it evokes these stereotypes and in the way it uses them to make a point. The novel has the same happy ending as the film, but the novel is more realistic and harder-edged as it makes its way to that ending. The world of Celie is a world of despair. Her letters show how much her life weighs down upon her, and this is something that does not come through in the film. Instead, her life on film is more like a historical evocation of a better time and place, with the exception of those moments when she is being brutalized by the towering Mister--these scenes are especially difficult to watch. However, even these scenes have a beauty that cuts against the
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Color Purple, Steven Spielberg, Miss Kenton, Lord Darlington, Harry Smith, Remains Day, Alice Walker's, James Ivory, color purple, remains day, War II, miss kenton, Square Press, world color purple, world color, inner life, novel color, walker's novel, steven spielberg, lost film, film version, novel color purple,
Approximate Word count = 1398
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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